


it hurts to become

by iphigenias



Category: DC Animated Universe, Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Post-Endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-23
Updated: 2016-04-23
Packaged: 2018-06-03 23:15:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6631123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iphigenias/pseuds/iphigenias
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Is it wrong to love two people at once?” she asks him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	it hurts to become

**Author's Note:**

> i blame may for telling me to watch young justice. this is set immediately after the s2 finale and ignores any and all comic canon (mostly bc i haven't read the comics). the major character death is wally. 
> 
> title is from andrea gibson: _I said to the sun, 'Tell me about the big bang.' The sun said, 'It hurts to become.'_

The Flash takes her aside, after. Slips off his cowl and rests a hand on her shoulder and tells her what Wally used his last words to say. She can’t meet Barry’s eyes. Tears blur on the edges of her vision and she doesn’t dash them away because she’s too busy carving a hollowness into her chest. They take the bio-ship back to her apartment in Palo Alto and she locks the doors behind her. It’s heavy, this emptiness.

There’s a bowl with specks of dried cereal clinging to its insides in the sink. The switch on the toaster is still turned on.

Artemis goes to bed in the early afternoon and tries not to feel like she’s sinking.

 

*

 

When the team’s called in for their next mission almost two weeks later she stays at home. Buries herself under books and words and paper and doesn’t look at the photo frames around the apartment that she turned face-down.

The mission after that, she leaves behind her bow and heads to the Watchtower alone. M’gann sees her first, makes a move that might’ve been involuntary, but holds herself still at the last minute. Artemis is glad. She can feel scars like cracks winding their way across her skin; if she’s touched, she might just break.

It’s a simple mission. Kaldur gives her guard duty. She hovers on the rooftops and tries not to feel like there’s something missing, not just the absent weight of the quiver slung over her shoulders. When they head back home Kaldur asks to speak to her. She follows him into the shadow of a doorway and watches, sickeningly amused, as he struggles to find the words.

“I’m fine,” she says to his eventual question, and the words taste bitter on her tongue. Kaldur lets her go without another word, and she wishes he didn’t.

Wally always knew when she was lying.

 

*

 

She asks Jade to hack into the Blüdhaven police scanners maybe a month later. Time’s measured strangely now, in fits and bursts she doesn’t care to keep track of. She sleeps through noon and has breakfast just shy of midnight and tries to pretend she isn’t falling apart.

She zetas to Gotham and hitches a ride to the next city over to find the one person she knows feels the same way.

His hair is longer. That’s the first thing she notices. It’s tied into a little ponytail at the nape of his neck, and there’s a blue hairclip that matches his suit keeping his fringe from his forehead. He takes one look at her in the polluted half-light and tells her to patrol the south side.

They meet back at Dick’s place. It’s small and dingy, not what Artemis expected from the ward of a multi-millionaire. There’s an air of disuse in almost every room, as though Dick uses the place for sleeping and not much else. Artemis peels off her mask and tosses it on the couch where it stares up at her, accusing.

“Kiss me,” is what she says, and Dick does.

 

*

 

She wakes beside a warm body and for a single glorious heartbeat forgets where she is. Forgets _when_ she is. The stretch of tanned back in front of her, devoid of freckles and that one obstinate scar just underneath the left shoulder-blade, reminds her that this is not home, and this is not Wally.

She sits up, gathering the sheets with her, and pulls her bra over her head and her underwear over her kiss-bitten thighs before Dick stirs. She sees his shoulders tense. His hair came loose in the night; whether during sleep, or before, Artemis doesn’t know. He sits up and looks at her, sheets pooled around his hips.

“I can’t,” she tells him, clutching her shirt to her chest and forcing herself to look into his eyes. Blue, not green. Disconcerting and wrong. _I still love him_ , she doesn’t say, but she doesn’t have to. Dick knows. Dick looks at her, and knows.

 _So do I_ , he doesn’t say either, and they sit for a moment on the bed, inches apart, bookends to the ghost of the boy they loved between them.

 

*

 

When she gets home, it’s not to an empty house. Zatanna is in the kitchen, stirring a pot of something that smells delicious on the stove that hasn’t been used in weeks. “How’d you get in?” Artemis asks, stupidly, before remembering who it is she’s asking. Zatanna just smiles, and says, “ _Liob._ ”

It’s chicken soup. Nothing Artemis couldn’t have just microwaved from a tin, but it tastes good. Maybe it’s the magic, or maybe it’s the fact that it’s made with real chicken, and not just the suspicious substitute with preservatives. Artemis has three bowls, and licks each one clean. “I haven’t eaten like that since,” she says, and stops. Puts down her bowl a little too hard on the wooden dining table; it rattles. Maybe that third serving wasn’t such a good idea.

Zatanna puts down her soup too. She pushes the chair from the table, an unpleasant screech across the tiles, and nods her head towards the couch. “Movie?” she asks, like Artemis isn’t sitting there, crying over a bowl of chicken soup.

She doesn’t know what they watch. Something with girls and soccer. Artemis lies on the couch with her head in Zatanna’s lap and falls asleep to the feeling of fingers too slim to be Wally’s running gently through her hair, working out the knots Dick had worked in. The movie keeps playing as background static, and Artemis hears Zatanna whisper, “ _Sselmaerd peels,_ ” before she’s drifting.

 

*

 

She wakes in her own bed and there’s a warm body next to her. When she opens her eyes she sees a shock of red hair and a freckled stretch of back, that one obstinate scar beneath the left shoulder-blade. She reaches out, and finds that he’s warm to the touch.

She wakes up, and the bed is cold. Her hand stretches out over the covers on his side, fingers curled like they were holding onto something only recently let go.

When Kaldur calls the team in for a mission that morning, Artemis tells him she’s sick, and spends the day burying her head in a pillow that smells like fabric softener and dust, as if every trace of Wally in their bed vanished along with him that day.

 

*

 

Dick is on the team next mission, and Artemis can’t meet his eyes, even behind their domino mask. Zatanna joins them, something about the League going through a dry spell, and Artemis is glad for the lie. Zatanna feels like a security blanket draped over her shoulders, and even though she knows she doesn’t need anyone watching her back, it’s nice to know there’s someone there, doing just that, anyway.

After, they go home together. Zatanna makes lasagne and Artemis ignores the ache in her chest. They eat a pint of Ben and Jerry’s each and watch re-runs of _Friends_ on the old, threadbare couch, Artemis in a tank top and sweats, her bra and shoes discarded somewhere by the front door. Zatanna’s wearing pyjamas she magicked from somewhere, and it should be silly, it should be wrong, Artemis laughing along with the TV audience and Zatanna’s hand splayed warm and comfortable on her thigh, but it isn’t. It’s _okay._ For the first time since that day, Artemis feels okay.

She looks at Zatanna in the flickering light of the television and finds the Leaguer already looking back at her, brows arched. “Thank you,” Artemis says, words rusty in a throat no longer used to sentiment, and Zatanna smiles. Rests her head on Artemis’ shoulder and squeezes her thigh through the sweats.

“I’m glad I can help,” is what she replies, and they watch the rest of the episode in silence.

 

*

 

Movie nights with Zatanna become a thing after that. Sometimes it’s after missions, either the League or the team, but most times it’s on nights they have to themselves, the moon slimming towards a point of nothingness in the sky. Zatanna cooks recipes her dad taught her, humming absently in the kitchen as Artemis catches herself staring, leaning one shoulder against the doorframe and unable to look away. A few weeks in, Artemis shoos Zatanna from the kitchen and cracks open one of Wally’s mother’s recipe books with shaking hands. She picks something simple, spaghetti Bolognese, but when they sit down at the table—Artemis at the head and Zatanna to the left, the right side always empty—and she almost shyly places the bowls down on the table, the smile Zatanna gives her is like a thousand suns lit up in the room at once.

To the right, Wally’s empty table setting doesn’t judge her, or accuse her like she was afraid it would. She smiles at his chair mid-chew and thinks that maybe this is how she learns to live again.

 

*

 

There’s a memorial to Kid Flash in Keystone City, a sculpture twice the size he was in real life. Artemis bypasses it, hands shoved deep into her pockets, and walks instead to the small, plain tombstone in the south-west corner of the cemetery, where an empty coffin lies under layers of dirt and new grass.

She rests the wreath she got at the florist on her way here against the headstone and sits on the grass right in front of it, close enough to touch the cool, smooth marble. The grass is dewy and damp beneath her but she stays seated, cross-legged, uncaring.

A breeze rustles the leaves of the sycamore above her head.

“I miss you,” she tells him, looking at the words carved into the stone. _Wally West, November 11, 1994 – June 20, 2016. Beloved son and hero._ And beneath that, in smaller lettering: _Bear patiently, my heart, for you have suffered heavier things._ Artemis trails her fingertips over the words, and breathes in the scent of the dying summer. Keystone is quiet around her. She remembers the first time Wally kissed her, on New Year’s Eve in the Watchtower all those years ago. She remembers when they moved in together, the first night they spent together, heady and slow, and waking up to find him curled into her stomach, a fact she would laugh about for days afterwards. She remembers going on missions with him, a solid and secure presence at her back, and she remembers the swoop of her heart when he told her he wanted to quit and she said, “So do I.”

She remembers those long weeks as Tigress beneath the waves, the separation from him a physical ache even then. If only she’d known what was to come—could she have saved him somehow? Or simply won herself a few more minutes by his side, minutes she wished could have stretched into a lifetime together, sweet and sticky and slow like molasses.

Artemis trails her fingers over the epitaph of the boy she’s loved for years now, and thinks suddenly, startlingly, of Zatanna: her smile, and the warm press of her hand against Artemis’ thigh. “Is it wrong to love two people at once?” she asks him.

The leaves in the sycamore rustle overhead in answer.

 

*

 

It isn’t Zatanna she goes to see afterwards, but Dick. Babs answers his apartment door. “He’s on patrol,” she tells Artemis with a sigh over too-sweet coffee in Dick’s mess of a living room. “He’s always on patrol these days, when he’s not on a mission with the team.”

Artemis nods. Sips her coffee. The caffeine hits her like a burst of adrenaline. “Are you two…” she asks, trailing off, and Babs gives another sigh.

“No,” she says, with a finality to her voice that bruises. “We were, but—he needs me as a friend, now. I’m just glad he hasn’t shut me out completely.”

As if on cue, the door swings open and Dick walks in, shoulders hunched like he’s trying to shrink down in space, fold in on himself and disappear completely. He catches sight of Artemis and, if anything, sinks down even further. She stands, leaving her half-finished cup on the coffee table, and walks over to him. Rests a hand on his bicep. This close, she can see the sheen of sweat clinging to his skin. It’s cold out, which means he’s been busy, but whether that means he’s been patrolling or punishing himself—or both—Artemis doesn’t care to know. She forces him to meet her gaze.

“You need to stop blaming yourself,” she tells him in a low voice so Babs can’t hear, and she’s not just speaking to Dick. “You have something good here, Dick. Something precious. Don’t lose it over your ghosts.” She moves to head out the door, but Dick catches her arm, and she stops. Waits for him to speak.

“I still love him,” he says, and Artemis hears Babs place her mug on the coffee table and move into the kitchen. “I don’t think I’ll ever stop being in love with him. I can’t do that to her.”

Artemis places her hand against his cheek and his leans into it, a movement that’s almost unconscious. “I love him too,” she says simply, an impossible smile edging its way onto her lips. “That feeling won’t ever go away. But there’s room in our hearts for more than one person, Dick.” She drops her hand and steps away, holding Dick’s gaze. From the kitchen she can hear Babs turn on the water in the sink. “He’d want us to be happy,” she tells him, and herself, and walks out of the apartment, closing the door behind her.

 

*

 

When she gets home, Zatanna is waiting for her, like she was all those months ago. “I thought you had the day to yourself today,” she says, a question that isn’t a question: _where were you?_

“I had some things to take care of,” Artemis tells her, and when Zatanna smiles it feels like something old that's come back to her and a new beginning all at once.  

**Author's Note:**

> the quote from wally's tombstone is from homer's iliad bc i love dying and being dead. the movie zatanna and artemis first watched was she's the man, kudos if u guessed it


End file.
